I took the day off of work on Friday the 24th and made the three or so hour trip from Pittsburgh to Columbus. Upon arriving at the Columbus Convention Center, I met up with the Speaker Chair of Ohio LinuxFest, Vance Kochenderfer, and set up the table runner at the table that was designated to Haiku. After that, I headed back to the hotel to drop off all of my excess baggage, got some food, and then headed back to the Convention Center.

The weekend of September 9th, 2011 marked my third year in attendance at the Ohio LinuxFest (OLF). My friend, Amir, and I arrived in Columbus right around 8 PM that Friday night, and after getting our belongings put away at the Drury hotel, we decided to check out the “20th birthday of the Linux kernel” celebration at the Hyatt hotel. We didn’t really know all that many people there, but minutes after arriving, we got chatted up by some people, and I was naturally asked about Haiku right away due to me wearing a Haiku shirt. There were a couple more conversations like this with some other people we met, which was great, as I got to show those individuals Haiku in action the very next day. I also got to talk to some people I knew from Pittsburgh, like klaatu, as well as my friend Vance from our Linux Users’ Group, WPLUG. Seeing as I still didn’t have my Haiku demonstration machines set up the way I wanted them, Amir and I decided to head back to the hotel shortly later around 9 PM. On the way out, I saw Beth Lynn Eicher (Director of OLF and former Chair of WPULG) wearing her red fedora and I made sure to say hello, not only because she has always been supportive of Haiku and its presence at OLF, but because she has been a good friend over the years.

Back at the hotel I worked on getting the demo machines ready. Initially my plan was to run Haiku natively on my Lenovo Thinkpad X61 and then run Haiku in VirtualBox via Linux Mint 11 on my Lenovo Thinkpad X120e in order to show off the Guest Additions that were done as part of Google Summer of Code 2011 by Mike Smith. I did get that running just fine, except Haiku was running on it quite slowly in virtualization, given that the X120e isn’t exactly a powerhouse machine. I decided to scrap showing the VirtualBox Guest Additions on the X120e, and instead just ran Haiku off of a nano USB drive that I had imaged earlier that day. I set up both Haiku machines to basically have the same setup, where we could show off multimedia performance and Haiku-specific strengths. Assuming I have both machines around next year, I’ll likely try a different configuration, where I’ll run Haiku natively from the X120e and run it virtualized on the X61.

Showing a video and webpage

After being satisfied that the Haiku machines were ready, I finally ended up getting to sleep around 3:15 AM. My alarm went off a couple of hours later, and after getting my shower, I headed off to the Columbus Convention Center. I got the Haiku table set up relatively quickly and awaited attendees to stop by to visit the table. Before things were too far along, a gentleman who was doing security at the event stopped by and told me how he used Haiku on his older machine, and that he loved it. That was great to hear, and I figured it was always good to be on good terms with one of the individuals running security. Rob Ball (Sponsorship Chair) of OLF stopped by early on as well, and made sure that we had electricity and all of our other needs addressed. Right after he left, Beth Lynn Eicher stopped by and we talked a bit, which was cool as I didn’t get to talk to her much the night before.

Well, after a long delay and BeGeistert 021 among us, I suppose it’s time to tell my story about the Ohio LinuxFest (OLF).

My friend, Amir, and I set out to Columbus from Pittsburgh on the Friday evening before OLF, and as we traveled, I could already feel the excitement. Once settled at the Hyatt hotel, I scrambled a bit to build/install Haiku on my MSI Wind U100 netbook. I also let Amir try out a live CD on his laptop, and we shared some conversation about Haiku. He wanted to come to OLF mainly for the various talks, and naturally I was there to help man the Haiku table. As he slept, I eventually got my system set up as I liked it with a GCC4 hybrid trunk build (with additional apps/media), and then went to sleep for a couple of hours.

This was my first time being at the OLF, or any computer-related event for that matter, so I didn’t know what to expect. Upon meeting Darkwyrm and Mike after registration, I felt right at home and knew the day would go just fine.